A family in Utah were left scratching their heads when they discovered that their backyard was littered with over a dozen dead fish that had seemingly fallen from the sky. According to a local media report, the weird mystery came to light last Thursday morning when Clark Jones stepped outside of his home in the community of Fruit Heights and spotted the creatures scattered across his lawn as well as atop his shed. Counting 16 dead fish in total, he theorized that they had been dropped on his property during a sizeable storm that swept over the area the previous day. "I knew it was going to be a big rain," he joked, "but I had no idea it was going to be, you know, biblical proportions."

Attempting to confirm his suspicions, Jones contacted the weather desk at his local TV station "to see if maybe there was a funnel cloud or water spout" and wound up being surprised to learn that his proverbial fish hypothesis was in error. Meteorologist Kevin Eubank explained that the storm did not produce "that type of a lifting event" which could account for multiple fish being sucked out of a body of water and then dumped into the homeowner's yard. Making the case all the more puzzling is that there do not appear to be any nearby lakes or similar spots which could have been the source for the curious creatures.

Since the fish are believed to be either carp or koi, the prevailing theory at this point is that birds may have plucked them out of a residential pond and then dropped them when they encountered the inclement weather. That said, even this explanation has issues as the dead animals were only discovered in Jones' yard with none of his neighbors finding anything similar on their property. Conceding that the odd incident could have been the work of pranksters, Jones expressed skepticism about such a scenario since that would have required the perpetrators hurling the fish into his backyard during the powerful storm. "I've never seen anything but water fall out of the sky," he ultimately mused, indicating that he is "still trying to figure out how they got here."